Immigrant Academics and Cultural Challenges in a Global Environme ...

classroom situations, adding their own layers of cultural diversity into the mix, can expect their social skills and cultural competence to be put to the utmost test.

Separate from the different culture of the larger society (city, campus, or college and university community) into which immigrant and expatriate scholars enter, the classroom is itself considered by experts to be a challenging world in its own right. In this world, the process of teaching and learning is nothing other than a continuous experience in intense intercultural and cross-cultural encounters. Many studies confirm that school-age children and college and university students in their late teens and early 20s have their own cultures—or, more appropriately, subcultures. The expectations for the experiential learning technique, which immigrants are often assumed to possess, dictate that the professor must have an understanding of or empathy for youth culture before he or she can engage the students in successful teaching and learning.

At the university level, however, the challenge goes beyond merely understanding youth subculture. University students, being culture bearers of their societies through formal and informal socialization and education, do have the imprint of their societies’ underlining philosophy on their minds and thinking. Engle (2007, p. B16), a college professor with a career spanning 3 decades on two continents, submitted an interesting observation on how very strong a hold “American mythic individualism” had on the thinking of American study-abroad students—the type of students whom, for 3 decades, he had taught in France. He noted that American graduate students, even those in the field of international relations and studying abroad, were uncomfortable with and refused to engage in “thoughtful” and necessary generalizations—a crucial demand of the intercultural process. Instead, the students were wont to interpret cultural differences in terms of universal individual preferences. This coincides with what Pike (2000) described as the U.S. penchant in its discourse and praxis on multiculturalism to stress similarities in contrast to the Canadian and European predilection to stress differences that must be appreciated and accommodated (pp. 65–67).

Engle observed that the precollege life of the American students entailed relentless pounding into their consciousness of the message of